Tag Archives: stop-motion

I did one more for my Digital Storytelling class examples. This is stop-motion animation. And let me say right up front – it is not a professional production, I know that!

I took a slightly different look at the story of Sisyphus. After writing my original idea for the story and planning for it, I realized I had to simplify – primarily due to my time constraints, and secondarily due to my lack of motivation. Stop-motion takes work, a lot of work, and an extreme amount of work to make it look good. I did not work that hard. (OK, I admit, I didn’t WANT to work that hard over my spring break for an example animation.)

I used Stop Motion animation app on my iPad. It is simple and easy to use. It allows the end product to be downloaded as an MP4. So I did that, and did the final editing in iMovie.

Here is the final result.

The steps in making this included: writing a script (rough in my head mainly since the story is familiar), sketching the character, rock and mountain, cutting out the poses for all, animating it, recording sounds, editing a final video all together.

Not being an artist, I had to find images to copy from. I think I did a fine job for an amateur, and if I were to produce something else I would probably hire an artist, of course. Drawing and then redrawing each image onto card stock and cutting them out took about an hour. After a test run on the app to see how it produced a video, I then jumped into my real production. As you see, I did not use a tripod. The hand-held part was for time and expense since I had little time to create some version of a tripod and did not have the funds to purchase a tripod to hold my iPad. The results make me sea sick – I’m sorry if it does the same to you. But, then again, this is only an example for my storytelling class (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it).

Shooting the scenes took 1-2 hours. Recording sounds only took about 5 minutes – I did a hint of boulders rolling since I did not have one around. Final editing took about an hour also, including finding a nice music track to use. I did a quick listen to music on Free Music Archives and found “Epic Song” (I thought appropriate to Sisyphus) by BoxCat Games. It has a Creative Commons Attribution license to allow use in the video here.

After trying to make a stop-motion animation, it increases your admiration for those who make them professionally – especially feature-length movies. It takes a true love of the art.

My class was assigned to create a story using animation (any type, not only stop-motion) that is at least 30 seconds but not longer than 3 minutes. I’m looking forward to seeing their creativity. You can tell me what you think of mine if you like.